Execution in Algiers
by Saboteuse
Summary: L'Étranger" aka "The Outsider" aka "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Account of the last moments of Meursault's life by a spectator at his execution. Yes, yes I DID write Camus fanfiction. I did.


_And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate._  
-The Outsider, Albert Camus

"_How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active, and works incessantly––probably hard, hard, hard––like an engine at full pressure."_  
-The Idiot, Dostoyevsky

- - -

_Dawn, Algiers, 1936._

It was a good morning for an execution.

My sister Agnès thinks I'm sick for attending so many of the death-dolings in the courtyard here, that my being a medical student doesn't excuse it. I suppose she's right, but if she could see the exquisite sanguinary propulsions the machine makes, the palpitations of its clients, and the deep unknowable looks etched on their faces, she might at least understand. The psychiatry professor has taught us about what goes through the mind of a condemned man. What a ghoulish thing to contemplate!

In any case, it was an excellent day, or at least the excellent threshold of one. The wind was eddying slightly in warm fresh swirls, the humidity pleasantly low; and I could feel the same sort of drop in air pressure that accompanies the steel prelude of a thunderstorm. The sky had for several minutes ceased to glow the luminous azure of the blue hour, instead lightening to a thin perfusion of aquamarine that thickened more and more opaque by the moment; the sun was still below the horizon, its light tracing and backlighting here and there the vague nebulous shapes of grey-pale clouds; and a fuzzy web of pre-dawn light hung in the air, settling on the tough dewy grass and the pebbled ground of the prison courtyard like a smokescreen. I always fancied in my giddy brain that one could run into it like the mesh on a door and bounce back––but in truth the door to daylight is so easily walked through, for it grows more and more porous with each passing second. The light turns the dark scrim to a netting, the netting to a cobweb, and then the light drips from the roofs onto the ground...but that was not yet. The dark motes still floated in the air.

As for the apparatus, it was still a only a black stencil, a framework of beams silhouetted against the bluish matte of the sky beside a thin tracery of barbed wire and dusky foliage.

There was a modest-sized crowd from which wafted and mingled an acoustic melange of laughter, gritty resentment and human astringency. Such bitterness, and how personally they all take it! It is not the man's crime they howl at, no, they have only convinced themselves that he is worthy of their ill-will so they may more fully sink their teeth into the blood sacrifice that society throws them, throws them as one throws a still-weeping bone to a dog. I heard the prisoner coming even before I saw him, sonically reflected by the gorging voice of the crowd—a fuzzy and raw-edged shape cruelly chalked. They cried out in half-rage, half-adulation––hunger and grief––like spectators at a football match, like a mother mourning her child.

He was not walking to his death so much as being dragged to it like a large sack of salt. His ankles and thighs were trussed with fishing wire, and when he passed me I saw that his hands were bound behind him with rope rather than the customary handcuffs. The wire looked very tight, and I wondered idly if the femoral artery was being compressed and if he was numb. The collar of his shirt had been jaggedly snipped away. The frayed edges looked tortured. Not the regular scallop of pinking shears—well, why would they use pinking shears—no; blunt scissors blades, certainly, that was it. I fancied I could almost see the soft fine hairs on the nape of his neck, and, a bit higher up, the contours of the occipital bone through his closely cropped hair. I had a hard time seeing his face at first because there was a cincture tying his arms together at the elbows––standard protocol, it makes them stoop––but, then, he struggled upward, his spine still rather curved but his head tilted obliquely so that he could see about him.

I have seen dozens of executions. Some men are proud. Some cry, some pray, and some do both at once. Some quiver and look away from the crowd, and some snarl back at their audience in bloody rapport. Spit in the eye seems to burn, so I never let them see me. I saw a man bite the executioner's apprentice once when he went to hold him behind the ears, the executioner reprimanding the fellow for his improper technique. "Keep your hands well clear," he scolded, "I've told you that before." I thought of when I was a child, of how I would bite the dentist's finger when he frightened me. The rubber glove between my teeth, the scolding of the man who was only trying to clean my mouth and bring health to my jaw, my gingiva, my tongue—that distinct pleasure-guilt of harming him. How different to lock your incisors around the naked, dirty finger-flesh of a man to be struggled against, a man who wishes you real harm and indeed shows it by pulling your head into place in a wooden brace and locking it there for the rest of your life? What was the taste of an executioner? The sordidness of the fear. The cringing of the nape before the blade.

I didn't know much about today's patient. I had heard conflicting stories––one claimed he'd shot someone over a woman, while another insisted the murder had been a stabbing and he had done it while intoxicated. It was an interesting change from the usual religion-infused Arab nonsense, at any rate. He wasn't making any noise and he didn't look like he would bite. His lips were slightly parted but the muscles in his face were relaxed. I saw moonstone-colored light reflected quietly in his eyes, the only bright points in a face otherwise obscure and charcoaled with shadows. The crowd bayed louder as he approached the guillotine. He wrested his shoulders slightly in the grip of the guards, probably trying to shake their fingers to a place that was not quite so deep in his armpits. Then he cast his eyes skyward, taking in the dawn that was creeping dimly through the trees.

As the curses and jeers of the spectators turned more personal he turned his gaze on the crowd. I wouldn't call it a smile, what passed over his face and remained there, infiltrating every pore and gracing his eyebrows and his cheekbones and the soft fine lines by his nose; but it was a sensate shift that transcended impassivity, a look of fulfillment. I'm not sure if he had blanched or if it was the whitening light that turned his complexion milkier, but as he walked beneath the branches of the thin trees someone planted all over the prison grounds a long time ago, the great shadow of his face turned to a great window for the sky. The day filled him like an empty glass. Prone, his head came into focus in the round lens of the demi-lunette; and the relief of his face was manifest in the light; and I could not tell if he had dissolved into the day––or the day into him.


End file.
